Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Blogger to Change to Google Blogs

A few hours ago Mashable.com got an exclusive about the huge Google rebranding. If you haven't heard, Google will be launching an ala-Facebook social network called Google+, which is perfectly fitting for their recently released blog widget +1.

As if the launching of Google+ is not big enough, Google is going to rebrand—yes, rebrand—their Picasa and Blogger services. These two products will be named Google Photos and Google Blogs, respectively. That all would be happening in a few weeks time, the earliest being at July 31, 2011.

Normally, I wouldn't be alarmed with such a rebranding. If Coca-Cola would rebrand itself as Godzilla Juice, I don't care. If Nike rebrands itself as Supashoe, I wouldn't pay half a mind. But Blogger being rebranded as Google Blogs, now that's a problem.

See, this blog's domain is tjsdaily.blogspot.com. Putting in the equation the rebranding Google is about to do to its Blogger service, my blog domain would likely become tjsdaily.googleblogs.com. So what's the problem? Here's the problem: Thousands of other blogs and sites have linked to Tj's Daily! using the former domain. If this rebranding pushes through—and if my fears, and thousands of other Bloggers as well, are correct—those links would be next to worthless because when a person clicks on it their browser will return 301 errors, 404 errors, and a host of other errors because my blog's new domain is tjsdaily.googleblogs.com.

Now, people in the Blogger community are divided with regards to this rebranding issue. Before Google acquired and rebranded Blogger, it was previously known as Blogspot. Now it would be rebranded again to Google Blogs. I guess half of the Blogger population is saying that it's just another rebranding, they got through the first one and this newer rebranding would be better.

The other half of the population is saying that this rebranding would likely bring negative effects to the established bloggers using the Blogger service, since it would effectively severe their influence on the web as mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Some Bloggers as early as now are talking about migrating to a custom domain (.com, .net, .ph etc.) to protect themselves from further unpleasant events and or anything that would cause harm to their pet domains. That's the advantage of using custom domains, I should've used one earlier.

That's not to say that all our fears are founded. Google being the internet giant it is, would of course most likely make sure that everything would run as usual even after Google+ launches. It might take a couple of weeks to a couple of months, but at least as early as now I'm assured that them folks at Google won't leave their patrons up in the air. They are, after all, Google.

What do you think about this huge change? Would you allow yourself to be called a "Googler" now instead of a "Blogger" because of the Google Blogs launch? Hit the comments box below.